The United States is a Kakistocracy
Voters (or manipulated voting systems) have chosen the worst among us to lead us into the abyss. At least we still have The Atlantic!
I learned a new word recently, thanks to the Hon. Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired Immigration Judge who uses the word frequently in his posts on LinkedIn.
It means government led by the worst, least qualified or most unscrupulous citizens. In the case of the United States right now, I think we could reasonably change “or” to “and” in that last sentence.
There are other words that could be used to describe what the United States is becoming in the era of Trump 2.0: oligarchy, kleptocracy, autocracy, dictatorship, despotism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism … any more that I’ve missed?
And given the speed with which most major American institutions — the media, the legal world, big business, universities, the tech sector — have immediately capitulated to Trump, we cannot rely on any of them to stand up to this madness.
So let’s be thankful for people of principle, such as Laurene Powell Jobs.
If The Atlantic had been owned by a different billionaire, we probably wouldn’t know about SignalGate.
I don’t mean to be a shill for The Atlantic, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to subscribe if you don’t do so already. We need to support independent media to ensure that we still have access to actual reporting and reliable sources of news.
I also learned about ‘stochastic terrorism’ which I think has been practiced by Trump and his cohorts since his first term. Remember ‘Pizza-gate’? We tend to think of terrorists only as people that operate outside of society’s legal and criminal boundaries, but I think Trump’s speech/tweets and in fact many MAGA republicans’ speech/writing can be characterized as stochastic terrorism because it’s hostile rhetoric used to scapegoat one or several groups like immigrants.
This is one of the easy ways out if you’re not qualified to the post you may be inhabiting in a government. Easier to scapegoat a group of people than do the hard work of real policy making.
This administration is guilty of all the bad -ocracies.